ON–286: Zoomed-in on Blockscout 🔬

Welcome to our next installment of Zoomed-in, an onchain deep dive series from OurNetwork.

This week we're zooming in on Blockscout, an open-source block explorer that has been around since 2017 and recently raised a seed round to expand its product offerings.

These new offerings include an Explorer-as-a-Service product, which provides hosting, branding, and continuous maintenance of a standalone block explorer, a burgeoning dapp marketplace, where users can discover and rate a chains' apps, and partnerships with Rollups-as-a-Service providers.

All this comes as the EVM, and especially Layer 2s, have continued to proliferate, providing a clear need for block explorers and associated tooling. As this expansion continues, Blockscout is looking to redefine what a block explorer can do.

Let's zoom in on some of those emerging capabilities below.

• Blockscout serves advanced onchain statistics and visual analytics for chains via a dedicated stats service. Account growth, transactions, fees, block size, gas usage, and contract information is available for various time periods and can be shared and downloaded in .png or .csv formats. As such Blockscout can provide the data crypto users have come to expect like active accounts on leading Layer 2s like Base, and daily average gas prices on Ethereum.

• As an open-source, public goods project, Blockscout develops new and unique features for a wide range of networks and environments. A focus on the Layer 2 experience has led to support for Layer 1-to-Layer 2 deposits/withdrawals, blob transactions (transactions batches), and output roots.

• Blockscout goes beyond conventional data metrics however with offerings unavailable elsewhere — these include dispute games on Optimism, MUD Worlds on Redstone, and Account Abstraction (User Operations) support for many chains. Below is an example of user operations transactions on Base.

• Blockscout usage has grown exponentially over the past year. In October 2023 Blockscout hosted 37 chains with a combined MAU of 123.8K. Currently Blockscout provides hosting services for 139 chains and rollups, with an MAU of 863.9K.

• Cumulative unique users has grown from 130K in October 2023 to 3.9M in October 2024.

Note: Metrics are only available for Blockscout hosted chains. There are more than 1000 self-hosted chains in the wild for which these details are not available.

• Rollup-as-a-Service providers are making it extremely easy for projects to spin up new chains with all the associated infrastructure, and Blockscout’s new Autoscout deployment feature provides a working explorer for chains in under 5 minutes. Blockscout is the standard explorer supporting chains using the Optimism, Arbitrum, and Polygon zkEVM frameworks. As such, Blockscout is already able to provide data like active accounts on the testnet of the recently announced Unichain, which uses Optimism's framework.

• In another example, of less-than-readily available data, Blockscout's infrastructure already tracks active accounts on World Chain, which was formally introduced in mid-October.

• Blockscout achieves much higher contract verification rates than Etherscan through its automated multi-database scanning feature. The Blockscout contract verifier scans several databases to identify and verify contracts as they are viewed or when they are uploaded to the blockchain via tools like Foundry, Hardhat, or Sourcify. A vast majority of the contracts deployed to Optimism are different types of Safe proxies, allowing them to be automatically verified with this unique verification flow.

• Blockscout will also provide a full-featured block explorer for highly anticipated Layer 2s including Kraken’s Ink chain and Sony’s Soneium (the Soneium Minato testnet is live here).

• Blockscout is expanding its value proposition beyond block explorers across 1,000+ chains — DAppscout marketplace is a new Blockscout discovery tool for exploring and interacting with dapps on a chain. DAppscout is now live on 13 chains with over 700 dapps representing DeFi, swaps, bridges, staking, lending, games and other categories. Users have rated dapps over 1,000 times, and the marketplace is experiencing steady growth as more users look for ways to find trusted apps and use them safely.

• The Blockscout Merits Program is designed to make blockchain exploration more accessible and engaging by rewarding users for their blockchain exploration activities.  Blockscout Badges, unique NFTs awarded for specific achievements, are now available, and participants will earn Merits for engaging in a variety of tasks both on Blockscout and associated platforms, such as the newly released Swapscout application.  The Merits Program will officially launch in November.

• As Layer 2s continue to proliferate, tools are needed to tie these environments together and provide a seamless cross-chain experience. Filling this need, Blockscout is developing a multichain search feature will allow users to search transactions, addresses, tokens and more across Layer2s. Multichain search is in development and will be released in early 2025.

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